The Armenian Harvest Table: From Blessed Grapes to Ghapama
The Armenian harvest does not end with the grape blessing in August. It runs on through the autumn, and the dish that closes it is ghapama. A whole pumpkin is hollowed out, filled with rice, honey and dried fruit, and baked until it can be opened at the table.
Here is what fills an Armenian autumn between the blessed grapes and Christmas, and why one pumpkin dish carries more weight than any other food in the repertoire.
After the grapes
The Blessing of the Grapes in mid-August marks the first fruit, not the last. What follows is the long part of the harvest: apricots dried for winter, walnuts, cornelian cherries, and pomegranates coming ripe through October and November.
Those are the same fruits that end up inside a ghapama. The vine, the pomegranate and the tree of life that appear together in Armenian ornament are not three separate symbols borrowed for decoration. They are what the year actually produced, in the order it produced it.
What ghapama is
A pumpkin is hollowed and filled with rice coated in butter and honey, then dried apricots, raisins, cornelian cherries, walnuts and pumpkin seeds, seasoned with cinnamon. It bakes slowly, whole.
It comes to the table as a sweet course near the end of the meal, and it is cut so the sides fall open like the petals of a flower to show the filling. That moment is the point of the dish. Nobody makes ghapama to be served on plates from the kitchen.
Historically the ingredients were expensive enough that it was a feast dish rather than an everyday one. Pumpkins themselves only reached Armenia in the nineteenth century, from the Americas, and were absorbed into the cooking from there.
The only song about a food
Ghapama has its own folk song, "Hey Jan Ghapama." It is the only song in the Armenian Folk Song Treasury written about a dish. The words describe neighbours arriving at the smell of it and staying until nothing is left.
Most people know it from Harout Pamboukjian, and from the film My Big Armenian Wedding. System of a Down recorded a version too, which is how a good many Armenian American teenagers met the song before they met the pumpkin.
Not only an autumn dish
This is the part that surprises people who file ghapama under harvest. It is served in autumn to mark the harvest, and it also appears at Christmas, New Year, Easter and weddings.
That makes it one of the few things on the Armenian table that belongs to the whole cold half of the year. A ghapama design is as much at home on 6 January as in October.
Ghapama and the American table
Thanksgiving is the one American holiday that lines up almost exactly with what ghapama already is: a harvest meal, built on squash and dried fruit, brought out whole in front of everyone.
Plenty of Armenian American households cook both, or cook one instead of the other. If yours is deciding what goes on the table this year, the overlap is worth noticing rather than treating the two as separate occasions.
Keeping the harvest in the house
The harvest motifs outlast the season they come from, which is why they were woven and carved in the first place. Our Pomegranate & Haykakan Symbols collection holds the pomegranate, grape and tree of life designs, and the Blankets & Throws are where most people start.
If you want the song rather than the fruit, there is a mug carrying the ghapama folk song design. It is a small thing, and it makes the point at a breakfast table better than anything on a wall.
The older harvest new year, Navasard, falls only days before the grape blessing. Between that and Christmas sits the whole Armenian autumn, and most of it is edible.